Reply to Toni Braxton says her child "cured" of autism through early intervention

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If it was autism, there is no cure.  So, her son got the wrong diagnosis.  My son was also diagnosed at 2.  A few years later he had his struggles but one doc still insisted it was autism by history.  It makes no sense to me.  Autism has now become the catch phrase for we don't know what is wrong with your kid and sadly minimizes the word and true meaning for those kids who do have it and deserve all the supports and help they can get.[/quote]

I don't really agree.  LIke ADHD, it's diagnosed by symptoms, so if you treat the condition so successfully that the symptoms disappear, then you may no longer meet the diagnostic criteria.  Plus, the brain is really plastic at young ages, so it makes some sense to me that, if the condition is caused by the brain being wired in a certain different way, that a particular kind of therapy can result in the brain re-wiring itself.  (Look at someone like Gabby Giffords for a really extreme example of how the brain can rewire itself.  Her brain re-wired itself around a great big hole in her brain.)  I just don't think we know enough about what causes the condition to be able to say that "there is no cure."  It's not even really clear that there's just one condition.  (There was a really interesting article in the NYT recently about research into regressive autism, and the researchers finding that, in many ways, it looks really different from other types of autism.)  [/quote]

But, by your definition, it would not be autism either.  There is NO cure.  If you are cured, you never had it.[/quote]

I'm not following your logic, and I don't think you've caught "my definition" (if I offered one, which I don't think I did).

If, at point X, you meet the diagnostic criteria for a condition, you "have it."  If, at point Y, you no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for a condition, you no longer "have it."  You can then say it's in remission (if it's that kind of illness and is expected to return) or that its adequately controlled by treatment (which suggests that, if the treatment stopped, the symptomology would return).  If the underlying causal factors have changed such that it won't come back even if you stop treatment, I think medical professionals would say that is a "cure."  Since we don't know the underlying causal factors for autism, I don't know that one can say whether the disappearance of symptoms means that one is "cured" or merely that the symptoms are adequately controlled with treatment and would return absent treatment.  One of the underlying causal factors for autism appears to be differences in brain wiring (at least in my understanding, which is not comprehensive) -- it's at least theoretically possible that the brain is re-wiring as a result of treatment which could result in a "cure."

But, putting aside this whole argument about "cure"....I am suspicious of any diagnosis at age 2.  There's a lot going on developmentally at that age, and I'm not sure it's worthwhile to make a neurological diagnosis -- synaptic pruning has barely begun at that age, so it's not really useful to talk about brain wiring being established in any real way at that age.  I also don't think it's clear, as of yet, whether what's called autism is really one condition, or is a bunch of different conditions, with different etiologies, that have overlapping symptomology.  (See the recent NYTimes article about research into regressive autism.)  There's a lot of unknowns here.[/quote]

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